Up From the Blue (13 page)

WE’D SETTLED INTO OUR
new neighborhood, houses spaced farther apart than they were on base, but following the same daily rhythm: the slap of newspapers on walkways in the morning, cars leaving their driveways just after breakfast, and kids returning in the afternoons. Our lives looked as perfectly normal as our neighbors’.

After school, we let ourselves into the house, and though we
were on our own, we moved around cautiously, as if we could hear Dad shouting.
Don’t set that there. Don’t eat that. Don’t forget to clean up your mess. You missed a spot
. Even our emotions were given rules:
No more crying. No more tantrums. No more prying
.

When our homework was done, we played outside. Phil used his pocketknife to carve his initials and a checkered design into a long stick, and some days, he dug through dumpsters for empty beer cans because he’d started a collection. I simply wandered, sometimes on foot, sometimes on my bike, never with a destination in mind, and often unaware of where I’d gone after I got home.

10
Hope’s Pink Bathroom

W
E HAD LOCKED OURSELVES
in Hope’s pink bathroom all afternoon, staring into the mirror, painting our faces in pastels, and singing Carpenters’ songs. When I first got to her house, we’d opened the bathroom window so the spicy scent of lavender that was planted just outside would drift in with the breeze. Now that the sun was going down, it was getting chilly.

For hours, I told her stories about my old home—the blue door that wouldn’t open, the bush out front that was covered in ladybugs. I told her about the things my mother sewed that we hung on our walls and how they turned slightly red from the fine dust that was always in the air.

Hope told me about the ring her father had given to the lady with only one hand and how she refused to put it on her finger.

“Maybe it’s because she doesn’t have a finger to put it
on
,” I said, hardly able to finish through my giggling.

“That’s the other hand,” Hope said, her face serious as she brushed her hair to a side part. “She wears it on a chain around
her neck because she doesn’t know if she can trust a man who cheated on his wife.”

I shrugged, as if that made sense to me, and opened another drawer. Inside were treasures: barrettes, strawberry shampoo, pill bottles, a green Magic Marker.

“Pass me some matches, would you?”

“Here,” I said, finding a matchbook and sliding it down the counter to her.

By then she had a Q-tip in the corner of her mouth and pretended to light up.

“You should smoke,” I said, approving. “You look good like that.”

“My mom says it helps you keep your figure,” she said, her words muffled from the Q-tip. She removed her glasses and took a long drag. “I think I look better when I’m blurry.”

“I think my hands look better green,” I said, coloring my nails with the marker. We hummed bits of songs while we dabbed on scents and colors, and rummaged through every drawer and cupboard.

“Turn out the lights, Tillie. I know a trick.” She pulled a candle out of another drawer, lit this one for real, and held it far under her chin. “You can see what you’ll look like when you get old.”

She passed the candle, and shadows and lines appeared on my face.

“Does your mom look like that?” she asked. “Did she? Before she went missing?”

“I guess,” I said. In truth, I didn’t remember. She was more of a warm ache that I didn’t want to go away.

Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw the streetlights come on. And when I pressed myself against the window to be
sure, I saw the one-handed lady walk across the lawn, ice tinkling in her brown bar glass.

“There she is!” I held my other hand out and tucked my fingers under to make a stub. I tried to hold in a giant laugh. I had never seen her at Hope’s before, though I’d seen her around town. She was pretty but not in any memorable way—someone you’d look at a little longer than others, then forget. Until you saw the hand, or rather, until you
didn’t
see her hand.

“Eww,” I said. “She just put it on your Dad’s chest.”

“I know,” she said. “She’s always touching him.”

I pressed closer to the screen so my nose was squashed against it. I remembered seeing her at 7-Eleven, trying to remove a bill from her wallet. She was clumsy, and the clerk looked away but then couldn’t help turning back to see.

“What’s it like up close?” I asked.

“I don’t like to get that close to it,” she said. “But I saw her lick it once. She made a cake and licked the frosting off her stump.”

“Did you eat the cake?”

“Yes, and it tasted like fingers!” We laughed so hard our eyes watered. We made our hands into stubs until our wrists hurt. I could have made that joke go on and on, but it was quickly getting dark.

“I better go,” I said. “I’ll probably get in trouble.”

We both watched our reflections as we left the pink room. Hope may have noticed her barrettes in my hair, but she didn’t ask me to return them.

The whole way home I watched my tennis shoes, first in shadow, then glowing under the streetlight, then in shadow again. The cold stung in the place where my mother was always there, always not there. But there was also joy. There were
these perfect afternoons that kept coming, just enough, here and there.

I caught the scent of strawberry shampoo, still on my hand. By the storm drain I found a scrunched bird feather and smoothed its gray wisps before putting it in my pocket. I wondered if people would mistake me for an adult in my makeup. I felt I must certainly look like my mother walking down the street. And could she come home, easy as this, someday? Would she know which house was mine?

That night the details of Momma’s face that seemed so difficult to remember at Hope’s came back as clear as if I’d just seen her. I remembered a time in the old house when she was still well and getting out of bed during the day. The doorbell had just rung.

“Hurry, Bear,” she told me, dropping to the carpet, where she would be hidden from view.

Before I joined her, I peeked from behind the curtain at the lady who sold makeup in our neighborhood. She carried her salmon-colored tote bag and wore a matching silk scarf around her neck.

We had let her into our house once, and she sat very ladylike on our sofa, laying out samples and talking nonstop. There was not a makeup pale enough for Momma’s skin, so after the woman applied the base, there was a peach colored line where Momma’s jaw met her neck. We tried different shades of eye shadows and lipsticks on our arms. Momma liked the bloodred lipstick, but the woman said that her best color was pink.

We bought two items that day. One was a necklace for me that had a rabbit dangling from it. The face opened like a locket and had a creamy perfume inside, which I dabbed regularly on
my wrists and behind my ears, though I didn’t like the way it smelled. Momma bought a lipstick: bloodred.

But this time when she rang our bell, Momma was determined not to let her in. “Hurry, Bear,” she whispered. “Get down.” And we lay there with our cheeks squashed against the carpet.

Hope had asked if my mother’s face was full of wrinkles, the way mine looked with a candle under my chin, and it was not. It was not smooth, either, but slightly bumpy like fancy stationery. She scarred easily. Paper cuts and scrapes all left permanent marks, but the creases on her face were only on one side of her mouth, the side that showed her smile. Even in photos, and there were not many, one half of her face showed no expression.

“Don’t move, Bear. She’ll go away soon.”

“Is she bad?”

Her answer was cryptic. “I’ll protect you,” she said. And seeing that smile now, in my memory, I recognize the mischief in her blue eyes, though, at the time, I truly feared that if the woman with the pink tote bag had seen us we’d have been harmed. It was the reason, later that evening, I secretly threw away the rabbit necklace.

We stayed there on the floor, long after the woman had left, talking quietly about things I’ve forgotten. And eventually I asked if we were allowed to get off the floor. If we could eat dinner.

“Dinner? Have we had lunch yet? Oh, never mind, let’s go eat something.”

And we stood, laughing again, because our clothes were covered in everything that had been on the carpet: lint, bits of thread, and long orange hairs.

11
School Steps

T
IME CONTINUED ON RELENTLESSLY
despite my fear that every day forward put me further from the last time I’d seen my mother. The leaves were turning to red and yellow. My hair was turning from dirty blonde to brown. I was still far shorter and skinnier than my classmates, but I had outgrown most of the clothes I remembered buying with Momma. If she saw me today—my two front teeth grown in big and crooked, like a rabbit’s—she would hardly recognize me. I used to welcome the new seasons, count down to the next holiday, but now these changes came too fast.

Despite the passing months, I had not made friends at school. Dad said I wasn’t trying. Maybe so, but neither were the kids in my class. If there was an empty seat beside one of them, someone would quickly throw a jacket over it and say, “It’s saved,” and then break into giggles.

In the cafeteria, with tables that unfolded out of the walls, I sat with the other outsiders. Shirley Chisholm Brooks was there.
We were the only two students who had entered the school as third graders that year, though when we stood side by side she looked like my babysitter. There were others from our pod who sat there, as well—the kids with leg braces, weight problems, lisps. We peeled the foil off our school lunches, eating limp broccoli and Jell-O molds with our heads down.

I tried to appear so interested in my lunch and, afterward, in my book that I didn’t have time for others. Being alone would look like my choice. I did the same at recess, keeping to the edge of the blacktop, where I drew pictures of Snoopy and Mr. Peanut in chalk. But today we had recess inside because there were reports of a streaker in the woods behind the school. I sat alone at my desk, holding the
Encyclopedia D
in front of my face.

Mr. Woodson put his hand on my shoulder.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked.

He shook his head and smiled. “Here, follow me,” he said, and led me through a row of desks. We stopped in front of Shirley Chisholm Brooks, who was busy scratching a paper clip on the cover of her textbook. Without a word, he took the paper clip from her, and pulled up a chair for me on the other side of her desk.

I hesitated before sitting down. I knew very little about her, other than that introduction on the first day, and of course, the bells. What we all knew about her was that she stayed inside for recess every day, but no one was sure what she’d done to get in trouble.

Mr. Woodson set three pennies between us and showed us how we could use them to play a game of soccer. Not once did this plump and moody girl say a word to me or did I say a word to her. But there was an ease when we were together, the ease of two outsiders. And that day, as we tapped on pennies and
occasionally flicked them through the goal posts, we did not feel pressure to have a conversation. We just moved the pennies back and forth from her fingers to mine.

The next day during recess, even though the streaker had been arrested, Mr. Woodson invited me to stay inside with her again. He folded a piece of paper into a thick triangle and showed us how to flick it forward. That triangle became our football, and our fingers the goal posts. We made goals, overshot them, and had the paper triangle stick to our fingers—all without expression, without words. Finally she stopped the game, keeping the paper football clenched in her fist.

“There’s a school near my house where all my friends go. I don’t know why you think this one’s so special.”

“I didn’t say it was special.”

“Good, ’cause it’s not,” she said. “And my name is Shirl. Don’t call me anything but Shirl.”

I looked her in the eye and shrugged.

“Are you girls getting along?” Mr. Woodson asked when he came in to check on us. I wasn’t sure, and neither of us answered.

Phil had discovered a path behind the school that led into the woods and along a creek, and you could follow it all the way down to the Potomac. On days he didn’t have a lot of homework, he’d head down to the river where he stood up to his shins in the water and skipped stones. He kept a homemade fishing pole along the way. It was the long stick he’d carved, attached to an old reel and strung with fishing line. He’d fish and climb on the mossy rocks, turning them over to see what was underneath. He’d come home with his jeans and sneakers soaked. I didn’t tell on him when he stored a dead copperhead in
the bathroom sink or a jar of worms in the towel closet. I could have, except the things he’d get in trouble for were the things I liked best about him.

Phil didn’t want me tagging along on these trips, so on days he went fishing I stayed late at school, sitting on the step near the entrance with my face buried in my encyclopedia, which was fatter now, with wrinkled pages that were easier to turn. I’d wait there until Mr. Woodson left the school because I knew he’d sit a while—not long, he always had his car keys ready—but long enough to listen to a story.